Search Engine Marketing Expert is the personal blog of Richard Lee. Here you'll find the latest news and tips on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), as well as overall information and resources on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a whole, which now also includes components of Social Media Marketing (SMM).

Blogging

With the rise of social media, Facebook’s ability to sort social information has become just as important as Google’s ability to sort search information. Facebook’s importance as a social search engine must be considered for anyone searching for information.

Similar to Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s social search algorithm known as EdgeRank, determines the importance of content in Facebook’s search results; or in Facebook’s case, users’ newsfeeds. Newsfeeds contain the EdgeRank results of information Facebook considers most important to you. Appearing in your newsfeed are the connections deemed most important to you as well as the content they suggest or create.

Links are such as huge part of search engines and the Internet that it is hard to imagine a time when they were not the main component of the Internet. From the great directories of yesteryear like Yahoo Directory to the king of search engines Google, links have been the main currency of the digital world.

Google’s first algorithm or formula to measure popularity of a website and ultimately it’s ranking position in the search engine revolved around counting the number of links to a website. This popularity score of links held as one of the standards of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for almost a decade. Wise to the importance of obtaining links to raise their websites standing in the search engines, webmasters sought to increase the number of links to their website, often by any means necessary. With links being such a vital part of search engines and Google’s dominance as a whole, it is hard to imagine anything in the online world that could one day surpass the importance of links.

In the next few weeks, Google and its Google Analytics team will be rolling out a new initiative with social-focused reports. Its goal is to help individuals and businesses measure the ROI on social media marketing.

How to Optimize a Blog in Blogger for Search Engines (Blogger SEO 101)

We’ve covered the general aspects of How to Optimize a Blog for Search Engines before, but this time, we will be focusing on how to optimize a blog within Blogger. Blogger is a blogging service owned by Google and publishes most of the blogs via subdomains of blogspot.com. Blogger also allows for other domains by using Custom URLs.

In regards to search engine optimization (SEO) for Blogger, there are two modifications to the HTML mark-up of the main template that can be done to optimize all posts. They are:

We’ve touched upon How to Optimize a Blog for Search Engines before, but that was mainly general information. There are specifics that can be done if you run a blog in various CMS or blog software, in this case, specifically, WordPress. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software available. It’s open-source and acts as a relatively robust CMS.

One of the key ways to optimize WordPress is a built-in feature referred to as permalinks. Permalinks is what WordPress generates as the permanent URL for your blog posts. By default, it’s set to be a number, which is based on the id of the post and when it is created. To set your permalinks to something more SEO-friendly, do the following:

Why should someone who “blogs” worry about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? One of the most common myths about utilizing SEO in blog postings is that the text will appear to be written more for automated engines rather than for human beings. While this is possible, the proper use of SEO will help to increase readership by letting you reach more people, as well as improve your writing technique by requiring more creative ways to work with text.

Off-Site Techniques for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Off-Site techniques, also known as off page factors, are SEO techniques based on factors outside of your website that have a strong effect on search engines rankings. It’s good to know what these factors are, even if only to be aware of their effect, as it is possible to perform some simple action based on these factors that may push a website/blog up in the rankings.